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Saturday, January 17, 2015

Last week i came from a 10 day long trip of Kolkata-Gangtok-Darjeeling. It was a tiring trip as I live in Mumbai and travelling 2 days in a train is by no means enjoyable. even if you are with your friends you are bound to get tired. But the trip was worth a visit. Although Kolkata and Darjeeling are world famous cities for various reasons I was quite surprised to see Sikkim to be such a beautiful place.

The Beautiful Rumtek monasteries, Hanuman tok, Ganesh tok, Rock Garden, Changu lake etc. The views are not only breathtaking but also mind freshening. Looking at the culture, people, environment, It Just made me realize, how big this world is and how single minded we think. Sometimes, we need to take a break and spend some time exploring such places.

Located in the Himalayan mountains, It is surrounded by 3 countries -Nepal, China, Bhutan. Until this trip I had thought the official language of Sikkim would be Sikkimese but I was surprised to see people here speak Nepali and another local language called Lepcha which I had never heard of but all people over here understand Hindi and are ever ready to communicate in it.

The people here are quite friendly too so if anyone is offering you a trip to Sikkim, My recommendation: Don't Hesitate. Small State, Small cities but Beautiful nonetheless.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Recently while chatting with a friend I was confused when he asked me something like "BTW wer r u now?".
I understood that he was asking me where I was staying , and the letters r & u stand for are & you but the word BTW got me in confusion. What does it stand for? Is it 'but' misspelt or 'between'? Later I understood that the word meant 'by the way'.

Such as been the jump in the English language that words like are, you , see, take care, by the way as been replaced by letters like r, u, c, tc, btw. Not just these words but many more beautiful English words has been replaced by shortcut word in these world of digital technologies.

Even numbers that were traditionally used for mathematical expression are now frequently been used in everyday sentences like b4 replacing before, f9 in place of fine and many more. First it was cheap sms services and then came the social medias like Facebook, whats app, Hike which has now replaced even the shortcut words into mere smileys or stickers.

This reminds me of "Word Crimes" song by American musician "Weird Al" Yankovic from his fourteenth studio album, Mandatory Fun (2014). The song spoofs misuse of proper English grammar, in everyday life.

The song shows common usage of words like 'less' instead of 'fewer', and the use of "to whom" as opposed to "to who" or the wrong use of "x" in the word espresso (n.b. expresso). Also mentioned in the song is the idiom "I couldn't care less" being commonly corrupted as "I could care less".

The video consists of the song lyrics explaining the song and beautifully made so that people would listen and read simultaneous. A must watch video song of 2014 for this generation public. Even the tune is catchy and would definitely make you humming it for some time.